AFFECTIVE ECONOMIES AND AUTISTIC ADHERENCE: EXPLORING NARRATIVE FIDELITY AND RHETORICITY IN 21ST CENTURY AUTISM DISCOURSES

The early 21st century saw discourses surrounding autism increase through a number of outlets, including documentaries from parent-led charities such as Autism Speaks, scholarship, and fictional media. As these discourses rose and proliferated, they relied not only on preexisting discourses related to disability’s position within society but also on neoliberal ideologies tied in with families and work. This dissertation aims to examine how these narratives construct a prevailing felt truth about what autism is and what the material effects of those discourses mean for autistic individuals. The texts for this project were selected for their relevancy as well as their reach to wider audiences and were subjected to rhetorical analysis based on affect theory and Walter Fischer’s narrative paradigm. These analyses revealed neoliberal discourses that used autism to further ideals of personal responsibility, entrepreneurship, and white middle class family values. Further, they found that these discourses often rely on the tropes of burden and failure and use the suffering of autistic individuals and characters to promote the interests of neurotypicals, particularly within the framework of white able heterosexuality. Finally, through undercutting the rhetoricity of autistic individuals in both fiction and scholarship, authors use autism as an Other to project and pathologize difference. These findings suggest a continued need for scholarship that traces the connections between socioeconomic ideologies and how they relate to the representation of disability, as the well as the need to examine how these narratives impact the daily lives of autistic individuals.